Journeying with Jesus — The Last Week (ch.3)

Mark 11:20ff

2nd Sunday in Lent, February 25, 2024

Rev. Dr. Ritva  H. Williams

This year as we prepare for Holy Week we are reading Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s book The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus’s Final Week to uncover details that are often missed as we move too quickly from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. A lot happened in between with Jesus moving back and forth daily between lodgings in Bethany and the temple in Jerusalem. 

Last Sunday we read once again the familiar story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey the disciples seconded in the village of Bethphage, amidst cheering pilgrims. On Monday morning, on his way into the city, Jesus cursed a fig tree, before “cleansing” the temple as a protest against the authorities who have turned God’s house of prayer into a den for robbers.

Today we focus on Tuesday of Holy Week.  As Jesus and disciples return to the city they pass by the fig tree now withered to its roots. They pause for a brief conversation, then continue up to the temple for a long day of  challenges, tests and provocative preaching. 

Here’s a quick review of the day (see page 824 in your pew Bible).

In Mark 11:27 we meet the folks most upset by Jesus’ actions of the day before: the religious, political and economic elites: the chief priests in charge of the Temple system), the elders/heads of leading Jerusalem households, and the scribes (their educated retainers and agents). They ask who gives Jesus the authority to do and say what he does. Jesus evades their question, tells a parable about “wicked tenants.” The chief priests, elders and scribes interpret the parable as an accusation that they are the wicked, greedy, murdering tenants (Mark 12:1-12).

Some Pharisees and Herodians try to trap Jesus with a question about  whether it is “lawful” to pay taxes to the emperor. For some the Pharisees “lawful” means: does loyalty to God permit us to do this? For the Herodians paying tribute to the emperor is an absolutely necessary part of the deal that gives them in political power and wealth (Mark 12:13-17). Then Sadducees, priests who did not believe in the world to come, ask Jesus a question about the resurrection designed to showcase the absurdity of a literal afterlife (Mark 12:18-27).

A scribe (one step down from the elites) approaches Jesus to ask what is the greatest commandment in the scriptures. Jesus and the scribe agree that loving God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself are more important than burnt offerings and sacrifices (12:28-34). 

Jesus poses a question of biblical interpretation (12:35-37), denounces those particular scribes who make a public show of their status and connections with the elites while “devouring widows’ houses" — code word for defrauding them(12:38-40). Jesus then lifts up a widow who puts her last two coins into the temple treasury (12:41-44). When the disciples marvel at the magnificence of the temple, Jesus warns them that all the great stones will be torn down (13:1-2).  While they are catching their breath at the the top of the Mount Olives, Jesus reveals the forthcoming destruction of the temple, and subsequent persecution (13:3-13).  He warns them of a desolating sacrilege that will  signal it is time to skedaddle immediately to the mountains to avoid being drawn into the violence. Instead, they are to stay alert for the coming of the Son of Man (13:14-27). Jesus urges them to learn from the fig tree its lesson: stay alert and keep awake (13:28-37). 

One of the intriguing threads that runs through Tuesday’s events is the fig tree. When we first meet the fig tree on Monday morning. It is leafy and green, but has no figs because it is not the season for figs. Passover is occurs in March-April, figs ripen through the summer and early fall (June-September). We may well wonder why Jesus is so annoyed by a fig tree that has only an abundance of leaves early in the spring.  He says to it: May no one ever eat fruit from you again. By Tuesday morning when Jesus and the disciples walk by the fig tree on their way to the city, it has withered away to its roots. Peter points it out, and Jesus replies enigmatically, “Have faith in God.”

Borg and Crossan describe these two incidents as “framing” the cleansing of the temple, leading them to conclude we should not read them literally but rather symbolically. The fig tree functions as a cipher or codeword for the temple and its failure to produce fruit (p. 35). 

The fig tree appears again in Mark 13:28 where Jesus urges his disciples to learn the lesson of the fig tree — to pay attention to the signs it produces, noticing if the fig tree produces only wonderfully abundant green leaves but never any blossoms, and hence no fruit. 

In Luke 13:6-9, Jesus tells another parable about a man who planted a fig tree in his garden. Because it has not produced any fruit after three years, the man orders the gardener to cut it down — it’s just wasting the soil. The gardener urges the man to wait another year, promising to dig around it and fertilize the fig tree with manure. We typically interpret the gardener as Christ, patient and compassionate, ready to keep working on and with slow-bloomers.

If the fig tree is a cipher or metaphor the temple, then we must wonder: what fruit did Jesus expect the Temple to produce? What fruit would or could grow within and from God’s house of prayer? Jesus’ only non-confrontational conversation that day points to the answer. Jesus and a scribe agree that the heart of biblical faith is to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself, and that this is way more important than elaborate and extravagant public displays of burnt offerings and sacrifices. 

God’s house of prayer is about showing up, listening, learning, sharing with God and God’s faithful people in ways that nurture and nourish “the fruit of the Spirit” that is embedded in embryonic form in our very DNA: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). 

As we continue our Lenten journey with Jesus, we are called to ponder (1) what religious traditions, social and economic practices, institutional and corporate values act like a killer frost on the early spring bloom of loving God and loving neighbor as we love ourselves? (2) how can we promote traditions, practices, and values that nature and nourish the fruit of the Spirit in our personal lives and in our lives together as God’s people?

This morning I would like to give the last word to the fig tree:

What the Fig Tree Said (by Denise Levertov, www.thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com

Literal minds! Embarrassed humans! 

His friends were blurting for Him in secret: wouldn’t admit they were shocked.
They thought Him petulant to curse me!—

yet how could the Lord be unfair?—so they looked away, then and now.
But I, I knew that helplessly barren though I was, my day had come. 

I served Christ the Poet, who spoke in images: 

I was at hand, a metaphor for their failure to bring forth what is within them 

(as figs were not within me). 

They who had walked in His sunlight presence, they could have ripened,
could have perceived His thirst and hunger, His innocent appetite;
they could have offered human fruits—compassion, comprehension— 

without being asked, without being told of need.
My absent fruit stood for their barren hearts. He cursed not me, not them, 

but (ears that hear not, eyes that see not) their dullness, that withholds gifts unimagined.